News UK, publisher of the Times and the Sun, has revealed how by better leveraging its data, it is transforming its business to become a “strategic partner” for its advertising clients.
Speaking at the Big Day of Data, Bedir Aydemir, head of audience and data, commercial, News UK, also called out other players in the market for profiting so widely from publisher content, while revealing plans to use data to boost audience monetisation.
“As a publisher we’re in a very unusual situation,” Aydemir said. “We’re creating vast amounts of first-party data – whereas other platforms are just aggregators. It’s our content that they’re using; we own the relationship with consumers and the data we have available to us is enormous.”
However, Aydemir said publishers suffered from “data leakage”, and without resolving that issue they would always lose out to tech giants such as Google and Facebook.
“Our data has been fuelling other companies for a very long time,” he said. “And I think publishers are now starting to say ‘hang on, what’s our USP in the market?’ It’s the fact we own this relationship and we generate this data – so how can we start to better use it?”
Aydemir added that, as a business, it was also crucial to better understand audiences. “Then we can monetise them,” he said.
“And by doing so, we can be seen much more as a strategic partner [with advertising clients] because we do have that unique level of insight.”
Aydemir also revealed how efforts to better understand audiences and the journeys they make across a portfolio of publisher platforms – which could help boost subscriptions, or predict the best piece of content or advertisement to show a reader – were likely to fall victim to the “unintended consequences” of legislation such as GDPR.
“In theory, what we’re trying to do with the next-generation of DMPs [data management platforms], is create a unified, single customer view across all of our touchpoints,” he said.
“It’s now much simpler to see a user journey and understand how different people are going about their business on your platforms and then deliver a ‘next best action’ – whether that’s a message about subscribing, or an article, or piece of branded content. There are probably 50 different things we could be doing.”
The General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect last year, aims to give people greater power over their data and make companies more transparent.
Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw a third party app collect data unknowingly from Facebook users then target people with political ads, is one example of what the regulation is trying to stamp out.
However, Aydemir said the likes of GDPR and the Online Harms White Paper were at odds with that mission.
“They will have a significant impact on how we can treat someone coming to our sites and how we can profile them. It’s at odds with everything a marketer is trying to do,” he said.
“There are definitely unintended consequences. What GDPR was supposed to achieve and where we are now are completely opposed.”
